Zombie Cure Lab News

Patch Notes 0.20.4
This is our third hotfix since the Major Update 4 to improve stability.

- Fixed two more important all worker doing nothing anymore bug (Should happen way less now)
- Autosaves fixed, did not show up in loading screen anymore.
- Hiding Locker moved to science category to not add a layouting category the build menu (Was confusing as we have a layouting menu and a building menu)

Known Problems: Savegames in bug reports won't be attached even though you checked the box.

Bug Fixes:

• Further fixes for the all workers stuck problem, should occur less. (Not garuanteed to be completely gone sadly)
  
• DockingHero can be opened from the game again, linking was broken since 0.20.0
  
• Further expection fixes
  

Known Issues:

• Autosave seems to be broken, we recommend to turn it completely off in the options for now until we fixed it.
  
• Freezes. Not really crashes, but the game freezes completely. We investigated it since the 0.20.0 update, but could not reproduce it internally. It happens to a smaller fraction of the player base, but in general makes the current version of the game more unstable.
  IF THIS HAPPENS TO YOU: Please send us your log file, wich you can find here:
  "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Thera Bytes\Zombie Cure Lab"
  Player.log
  
  You can send it to us via our discord channel or contact us via steam forums.
  It would help us greatly to understand when and why freezes can occur.
  
  Until then you can switch to the beta branch "previous_version" to play a more stable freeze free Zombie Cure Lab version.
  
  We are sorry for the inconvencies, thank you for your support. We will get things working again soon.
  

Patch Notes:
With our recent Halloween update 0.20.0 we sadly added new problems to the game, wich originate from bigger technical reworks.

Bug Fixes:

• Major problem with all workers stopped working adressed with multiple fixes. (This maybe also adresses the workers not shooting at towers problem)
  
• Calming escorting bug fixed where multiple haulers tried to get the same frozen humbie, which led to the humbie being stuck at a calming station.
  
• Fixed a potential savegame related problem with worker gadgets (hand attachments like weapons/ pickaxe etc.)
  
• After loading savegame from within the game, some a.i. logic activities were broken.
  

Known Problems:
We went through the automatically send crash reports, but we could not reproduce any crashes on several machines. The crash reports were also inconclusive, but hinted towards old hardware being a potential problem (15 year old graphics cards etc.).

We are sorry for the new stability problems and this patch only addresses the most critical problems we could identify. Our focus at the moment is to ensure technical stability and eliminate new bugs to ensure that our recent technical changes work well and do not cause more unplayability. So we change our mode to be more responsive to new bugs and improve the current state steadily.

Thank you for staying around.

Major Update to address performance issues/ balancing/ bugs:

[h2]Overview[/h2]
Performance improvements:

• Engine version updated (smaller performance boost)
  
• Job system multi-threaded
  
• Many smaller performance improvements (See detailed patch notes)
  
• Memory leak fix
  

Content/ Features:

• Zombies wearing pumpkin hats (Very scary)
  
• Pumpkin decoration
  
• Seasonal halloween content (Will automatically switch on from now on between 24.10 and 06.11)
  
• Gameplay hints in loading screen (And an actual loading screen where you can see progress and such!)
  

Balancing:

• Tutorial easier, steps to avoid some frustration.
  
• Very easy mission actually very easy now; Zombies deal almost no damage.
  
• Difficult mission less difficult. (Elite Zombies were almost unbeatable)
  

[h2]Patch Notes 0.20.0[/h2]
Features:

• New loading screen with loading bar and gameplay hints
  
• Treatment chamber now shows status that resources are missing for treatment (Previously only showed when inputs were empty, but requires full inputs to operate)
  
• Seasonal content, for the time of 24.10. to 06.11 the game will show Halloween content with Zombies wearing pumpkin hats and more to discover!
  
• New pumpkin deco assets (permanently)
  
• Research tables, data simulators and T4 fridges now show a floating text with what resource they just produced to give better feedback.
  
• When placing a building in invalid location it now creates a floating text explaining why placement was invalid.
  

Balancing:

• Difficult mission decreased Zombie damage, more nights without zombies and less damage for elite Zombies to make the mission beatable.
  
• Tutorial smaller changes to reduce frustration and improve onboarding. Also changed Zombie reduced zombie damage to dealing almost none, to better guarantee that you can’t lose the tutorial. Zombie waves also only start when player has built defenses.
  
• Scientists turned into Zombies now carry a lesser weapon to deal less damage (Also affected tutorial difficulty)
  
• No more boss zombie in tutorial.
  
• Snowball shooter T2 and T3 deals a little more damage to tackle high health Zombies that can appear relatively quick in higher difficulty missions.
  
• Damage effects of Zombies attacking buildings increased in size.
  
• Reduced chase speed of Zombies (Was off the charts for some reason)
  
• Very easy mission zombies almost do no damage now, very small decrease left with high threat levels, should now be actually very easy.
  

Fixes/ Improvements:
The new engine version, multi-threading and performance improvements were major changes for the game and took quite a while and required lots of testing.

• Updated engine version which should already improve performance a bit.
  
• Job system now works with multi-threading, reducing CPU bottleneck performance problems. Big bases with lots of workers should see larger performance improvements.
  
• Fixed a memory leak regarding power pole placement, potentially reducing problems with the app occupying to much RAM.
  
• Small performance improvements (Reduced number of implicit casts, less character checks, smarter temperature visualization updates, health bars optimized, other)
  
• Lazy loading for menus
  
• Iron Ore/ Resource pick up problem fixed with resources sometimes not being picked up.
  
• Improved distance weighing for resource pick up drop off points, choices were to bring gathered resources are weight better with smaller distances.
  
• Big music notes bug fixed, reduced scale.
  
• Fixed a problem with tree nursery deletion.
  
• Cure progress option now hidden when antidote progress reached maximum
  

Known Issues/ Problems:
We made lots of changes to the technical core of the game, testing the game in every possible way to ensure everything runs stable costs lots of time and there are changes that instability problems will manifest in the late game.

PERFORMANCE: Depending on what your bottleneck is, performance might only slightly improve as we mainly tackled CPU and not GPU. Meaning if your graphic card can't handle Zombie Cure Lab, it probably still can't.

Loading old savegames from 0.19.4 is not garuanteed to work, we changed to much logic in the game.
But let us know! We are still in early access and every input helps, savegames and logs fuels our bug solving engine. Write us here in the comments, open a discussion in the steam forums, write an ingame bug report (Good to send savegames and logs and yes we read all of them) or join our discord!
Thanks for hanging around and thanks for any effort you took or will take to help us make Zombie Cure Lab a better game experience!